Dry Stone Walling: Materials and Techniques

Nick Aitken is a Scottish drystane dyker, now retired to the Pacific Northwest, USA. He is a qualified Master Craftsman and instructor through the Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain. He has worked throughout the Scottish Highlands and Islands, from Glencoe to Caithness and St Kilda, and is familiar with many stone types and dry stone building techniques. In 2001 he was awarded a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to travel from Nova Scotia to New York to study the local dry stone walls and stonework, ancient and modern. That trip, and others to Ireland, Austria, Mallorca and Canada, convinced him that dry stone walls are infinitely variable and, at the same time, all fundamentally similar.